Hey guys, welcome back. Hope you guys had an amazing Thanksgiving. We apologize to our
followers for not having a podcast update in the last few weeks. No, it's interesting
we talked about the balance between home life, work life, and I did not have very much luck
or success with that in the past few weeks, not just through the holidays, which kind
of brings me into the segment for today and that is separation season. Ed Milet gave a
or had a great podcast on it for those of you that haven't listened to that go check
it out. It's phenomenal and it's a great point of view and it's something that we've
been implementing here at Elder Contracting in our business and as you can guess separation
season is basically the season to separate yourself from your competition separate yourself
from others and it's a crucial point in the timeline of the year for every business because
what happens during the holidays? Okay, the world slows down. I'm sure you guys experienced
it with Thanksgiving, you know, just a week of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was, you know,
towards the end of the week, but just a week of the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Those days
were even slow as well. Schools out, you know, people are off work. But the people that
stay and work and continue working, they check out and that is extremely dangerous. And we've
as a company have been talking about that a little bit and we've been trying to focus
ourselves on pushing through and not checking ourselves out mentally in order to create
this gap between us and our competition. And so I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about
this going to more depth and maybe we could brainstorm, you know, talk about some, or
at least I can share the ideas that we have or the things that we're doing to actually
push through the this, you know, the season of holidays, family time, where it's really
easy to get distracted. It's really easy to check out mentally, slow down and wait for
the new year to begin. I'm sure all of you guys have had the experience of setting New
Year's resolutions that you never truly fulfilled, let alone even started. I can tell you I
am not excited for the gym come New Year's because I'm not going to have the machine
availability that I'm used to. And it's going to be full of people that are starting the
New Year's resolutions now don't get me wrong. That's exciting. And it's going to be great.
And I'm rooting for every single one of them. But the reality is not everybody is going
to commit not everybody is going to see results. Now everybody's going to push through. And
that's just the way life is. And it's sad and it's depressing, especially when it's your
friends, it's your loved ones, people who, you know, try but don't, don't stay consistent,
right? Or they don't try hard enough or they give up. Well, let's talk about the businesses
in that year surrounded by that are doing that exact same thing. Only they start way
early, like most other people, right? They check out come Halloween time, you know, maybe
the first couple of weeks, November, they're so pushing, but one Thanksgiving hits from
from that week of Thanksgiving. And this is my opinion from that week of Thanksgiving
to the new year. Everybody has slowed down. Everybody's trying not to work as hard. Everybody's
trying to do more. You know, they're trying to shop more, obviously, they're trying to
spend more time with family, which there's nothing wrong with that. Okay. But what happens
is it's easy to check out for a half day or just get a few things done and be like, you
know what, it's okay, my clients aren't going to worry about it because they're not following
up with me or, you know, not a big deal. I can take care of this, you know, in a couple
more weeks because the demand really isn't there. And it may not be, I know for us in
construction, the demand for construction, obviously we got projects going on. And when
we're not inside a client's house, so we got two types of product, right? We got the project
where we're intruding on the life of our clients. Okay. Those people are always kind of involved,
right? Especially around the holidays, hey, are things getting done? Are we on schedule?
Right? Then you have the clients where we're doing, you know, additions, we're not really
in their, their home life, we're not invading and they don't really care, right? So we have
those clients that will not follow up with us for three, four, five weeks as we're going
through these holidays. And so what, what are we doing? What can my people do to continue
pushing? What can we do as a company continue pushing? Because if you have all these companies,
like these clients I'm talking about, you know, if you have employees, if you have companies
that are slowing down, they're checking out mentally, right? The production isn't there
anymore or the level production has dropped down significantly, that is your opportunity
to get ahead. Okay. When everybody else slows down, that's where if you maintain your pace,
better yet, if you 10 times your pace, if you pick up your pace, you are going to create
an enormous gap between you and other people. Okay. The, the, we saw this back when COVID
hit. Okay. We all remember COVID mandate shut down all businesses. A lot of people did shut
down their businesses. A lot of people suffered because of it. Okay. A lot of people like
us didn't stop moving. We kept going. And due to that, we were able to build a bigger
reputation. We were able to just excel so much more than all these other companies.
Matter of fact, a lot of the companies that it's, and I get, I'm talking about construction
that actually stopped, they're not here anymore. Okay. They, they, they had to close their
doors. They couldn't keep going and they weren't able to deliver the product. Right. Then you
have our company that kept going. We were consistent. I know some other companies that
were very consistent and not only did they get through it well, right? And not only did
they flourish in COVID, but they ended up excelling themselves and creating this ginormous
gap between them and their competition that they can't even, they're not even in the same
lane anymore. They're not even competing. And that's kind of what happened with us.
And so that was my personal first time experience with a separation season, a type of event
or, you know, a holiday or whatever you want to, you want to call it that, that the world
or the people around you kind of slow down and that is your opportunity to really push
forward. Okay. So we're really excited for this season. You know, one, you got family
time, you got holidays and you do get some time off, obviously, right? Where I'm excited
to spend some time with my daughters and my family. It's been a long year of hustle, long
year of progress. But at the same time, we're still pushing hard. We're not slowing down
on marketing. We're not slowing down on our jobs. We're not slowing down on ourselves.
Okay. We're hitting as many as appointments. We're trying to get as many appointments as
possible trying to sign as many contracts. Just yesterday we signed three contracts.
And our main goal here is to really create this gap between our competition. Okay. This
is your guys's opportunity to do the same exact thing. So those examples I just shared
right now are the ways that we're doing it, right? And it's not necessarily doing a million
times more than what you're doing. I'm not telling you guys to go out there. I'm not
telling you not to enjoy your holidays. I'm not telling you to take some days off, spend
some time with your family, eat some food. I'm not telling you to do that. What I'm telling
you to do is that you guys need to be smart. Okay. Be smart. Be logical. And in the days
you guys are working, do not check out. It is another day in business. The hustle needs
to be maintained. The broke mindset needs to be maintained and you need to be pushing
forward and 10 X in all of your efforts. Okay. And pushing to get all these people that are
looking for your service that are even more now because guess what? The people that would
have gone to other companies are now going to come to you because those companies slowed
down, their employees slowed down, everything about them checked out and you're over here
pushing. So therefore you're more active and they're going to be attracted to you rather
than your competition. Okay. Just because it's a holidays does not mean people are not looking
for your service. Okay. Even in construction right now is the time for, you know, where
clients are looking to get stuff done in January. Right. They're not going to, they may not
sign in December. They may wait for tax, you know, taxis into come, maybe get their funds
from the government, which is totally fine. But because I didn't slow down and because
we kept marketing because we kept making appointments and kept working our butts off. Guess what?
We didn't give the clients the opportunity to even consider our competition because our
competition was nowhere to be found. They were at home baking cookies Monday through
Friday instead of Christmas Eve. Does that make sense? So this is exciting guys. I'm
excited. Our teams excited. We're excited to see the results. I'm excited to see all
of you guys and what you're doing in life right now to see what kind of gap you can
create between you and your competition. And these are the moments that we live for. Right.
So I hope you guys have an amazing holidays. We do have more podcasts coming out. We're
going to post a couple more obviously for Christmas, we'll have a Christmas special edition
coming out, which is going to be awesome. We'll have guest speaker. And in the meantime,
I want you guys, I invite you guys to go, go plan something. Okay. Plan how you are
going to make sure you're not going to slow down. Make sure that you're going to keep
pushing forward. Okay. Make sure that you're going to keep progressing. Okay. Get creative.
Cause I can promise you it's going to change the entire year of 2024 for you guys. If you
can just push through and not slow down the next five to six weeks, it's going to be a
game changer. Then I want you guys to come back and I want you to drop comments on the
results you saw for not slowing down for not checking out this holiday season. Hope you
guys had amazing Thanksgiving and we look forward to talking to you guys next time and
thank you for tuning in to homework assignment. You can find our links down below to our home,
the homework assignment podcast, also to other contracting and you know, keep, keep following
what we're doing guys. And it's really important for us to know if you like our podcast, if
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great people to guide us through our journey as well. And we're just trying to get back
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